MOOCs oer world-widely accessible online content typically including videos, readings,
quizzes along with social communication tools on a platform that enables participants
to learn at their own pace. In 2016, over 58 million people join MOOCs.
Far fewer people actually participate in MOOCs than originally sign up and then
there is a steady attrition as courses progress. The observation of high attrition has
prompted concerns among MOOC providers to mitigate their high attrition rates.
Recent studies have been able to correlate social engagement of learners to course
completion. Researchers use participants' digital traces to make sense of their engagement
in a course and identify their needs to predict future patterns and to make
interventions based on these patterns.
The research reported here was conducted to further understand learners social engagement
on a social-constructivist MOOC platform, the impact of engagement on
course completion, and to predict learners' course completion.
The ndings of this research show that a commonly known social feature, follow, which
is integrated into the Futurelearn MOOC platform has potential value in allowing
tracking and analysing the behaviours of participants. The patterns of learners social
engagement were modelled and a completion prediction model was developed. This
model was successful at predicting those who might complete the course at a high or
low success rate.
The contributions of this research are that the behaviour chains could be the basis of
a personalised recommender system, and the completion model based on social behaviour
could contribute to wider prediction model based on a wider range of factors. |